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Atari 520ST

VERAULT said:
Nice, thanks for taking the leg work out of splitting those ROMS. I will have to try those out.
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No worries, let me know how it goes. I had to script it out, if I repeated that process 9 times manually I was bound to screw it all up.

I tested Star Raiders. It boots to TOS and you have to launch it from the rom cart, which shows up as C:\. Upon running, it complains it can't find a file on the A:\ drive, but you can skip the error and the game plays.

So minus a quirk here or there, it's looking pretty good for these. This was also a great lesson for someone like myself who's a total noob to the ST platform why there aren't a bunch of cart games for it; disks just made way more sense for distribution of software by then it would seem, and there just isn't that much ROM space to work with on a cart here. 128K isn't much for what it seems these systems are capable of, since in the grand scheme of things it's basically 1/3rd of a single-sided 3 1⁄2" floppy disk (360K). With all that said it was a fun exercise and I hope perhaps it's useful to someone here or there.
 
I have an odd problem. I picked up another 520ST Cheap that was DOA. It was dead when I got it. I cleaned the pins on u 12 and u15 and straightened all the pins and this got the unit booting to TOS (and incredibly fast too), but it doesnt bother to boot off anything in the cartridge slot. And It will NOT boot directly to a working diagnostic cartridge. The cart works fine on my other 520ST. Any ideas why this 520 ST is ignoring signals from the Cartridge slot?
 
VERAULT said:
I have an odd problem. I picked up another 520ST Cheap that was DOA. It was dead when I got it. I cleaned the pins on u 12 and u15 and straightened all the pins and this got the unit booting to TOS (and incredibly fast too), but it doesnt bother to boot off anything in the cartridge slot. And It will NOT boot directly to a working diagnostic cartridge. The cart works fine on my other 520ST. Any ideas why this 520 ST is ignoring signals from the Cartridge slot?
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Same version of TOS? Perhaps try swapping out your roms in known working machine to this one? Besides that would start probing cartridge port area for possible broken traces
 
mbliss11 said:
Same version of TOS? Perhaps try swapping out your roms in known working machine to this one? Besides that would start probing cartridge port area for possible broken traces
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No, Not sure the version of TOS. I still have the original ROMS from the 520ST I upgraded . Iwas thinking about swapping those. Thanks. I will give that a try.

The machine is odd, it boots to the toss desktop almost instantly. Faster than my working 520st. As if it has custom roms. So maybe you are on to something with the roms.
 
VERAULT said:
The machine is odd, it boots to the toss desktop almost instantly. Faster than my working 520st. As if it has custom roms. So maybe you are on to something with the roms.
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I'd dump them and search the hashes for the hell of it.
 
VERAULT said:
I wasnt going to toss them. I wouldnt do that.
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Oh I was not assuming you would!!! simply that I would dump the contents of them and search the CRCs etc to see if they come up on google.

I come from arcade collecting where you (should) dump roms on any board you receive that may not be archived. That way we can all use the 'romident' program included in MAME to determine if we have a potentially undumped chip, presuming it's not faulty. I recently found and archived an undumped vTech Laser 128 ROM revision as well; the newest one seen that runs on the original hardware revision.
 
Ok So I tried my TOS 1.0 roms on this machine and it behaves the same. In fact looking at the numbers on the roms I think they are the same version. So cartridge slot still not working.

edit: Also I tried the Hard drive SD module device I bought from Masteries. IT doesnt even boot from that thing either! When it gets to the GEM desktop there are no icons and the module activity light seems active forever but nothing ever happens.
 
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If you recall, TOS 1.0 has problems with DOS formatted drives of which your Hard drive SD device may be an example. A better test might be to try the same thing with your TOS1.04 EPROMs in it.
 
SiriusHardware said:
If you recall, TOS 1.0 has problems with DOS formatted drives of which your Hard drive SD device may be an example. A better test might be to try the same thing with your TOS1.04 EPROMs in it.
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Yes.. but the issues are file names showing up distorted. I was able to use the hdd device on my first sysyem when it was tos 1.0 were not talking conpatibility issues.. its just not working at all and that has nothing to do with TOS 1.0
 
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